Pindar (Morice)/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
GREEK CHORAL POETRY—ITS MATTER.
From the form of a Choral Ode we pass now to consider its matter,—the occasions which produced it, and the sources from which its themes were drawn. It might, perhaps, have been expected that these would have been identical, that the occasion which produced an Ode would itself have supplied the poet's theme, and that an Ode of Pindar, composed (let us say) to commemorate a chariot victory at the Olympian games, would have been occupied mainly with a description of the circumstances and consequences of the victory. But such, as we shall see, is by no means usually the case. The actual occasion of such a Triumphal Ode is sometimes touched upon so lightly, as to leave it open to dispute whether the victory which it commemorates was won at the Isthmus or at Nemea, at Delphi or at Thebes; whether the victorious car was driven by its owner or by a professional charioteer; whether the commemoration followed instantly upon the victory, or whether days, months, or even years had elapsed between them. These topics are not, indeed, actually excluded from the Ode. The poet touches upon them, but as it were en passant, and usually by means of allusions, sufficient, no doubt, pleasantly to remind the victor and his friends of circumstances with which they were already familiar, but conveying little information to readers who know of these circumstances no more than the Ode itself tells them. Generally from the briefest notice of these points which would satisfy the poet's sense of the compliments due from him to his patron's achievements, the Ode passes with all convenient speed to a wholly different range of topics—to legends of ancient gods and heroes, moral reflections on every circumstance of human life, from the cradle to the grave, expositions and justifications of religious, social, and political creeds, from all which the poet only returns at rare intervals, and, as it were, perfunctorily, to his professed theme—the actual occasion of his poem.
These occasions were of every conceivable kind. Every circumstance of Greek life, civic or private, gave opportunity for a Choral Ode. The love of pomp and ceremonial was one of the most marked features in the national character of the Greeks; and in all their ceremonies an indispensable and prominent element was that of Music, in that wide sense in which the Greeks always used this term, including under it Poetry and the Dance. Was a temple to be founded, a magistrate to be installed, a distinguished athlete welcomed home from a successful visit to Olympia or the Isthmus, a local deity to be honoured at the annual recurrence of his festival,—the talents of the choric poet were at once in requisition. Kings and free states not unfrequently maintained a troupe of professional singers and dancers, ready to undertake at the shortest notice the performance of the most elaborate Ode. It appears that similar troupes were sometimes attached to the service of an eminent poet, and were sent by him, with an Ode composed for the occasion, to attend public or private celebrations in foreign states. And such was the general musical culture of the average Greek citizen that, in the absence of professionals, it was sometimes possible to organise an amateur chorus willing and competent to undertake their duties. Other occasions there were of far different character, but equally demanding the services of the choric poet. The citizens of some distressed town, decimated by plague or famine, or alarmed by natural phenomena, which they took for portents, would endeavour to appease the offended gods by propitiatory sacrifices and the performance of a solemn Pæan. Or the kinsmen of some youthful warrior, fallen on the field of battle, and borne home a corpse to his weeping bride, would call on the poet of the day to grace the dead man's obsequies with his most pathetic dirge—strains which should, in the language of a Roman poet,[1]
"Bear to starry heights away
That Might, and Mettle bold, and golden Worth,
And grudge dark Death his prey."
It is difficult to classify, according to any strict principle, all these various occasions; but we may perhaps distinguish among them three chief kinds, and group the different species of Greek Choral poetry according as they were intended (1), to grace the services of religion, or (2) to do honour to distinguished men of the day, or (3) simply to heighten the pleasures of a banquet. To the first class will belong hymns sung at the regular festivals of the national gods, relating their titles, their attributes, and mythical exploits—Prosodia or processional-chants; Pæans—originally propitiatory hymns designed to avert from the state some specific calamity, but afterwards including songs of public thanksgiving—or prayers for the favour of a particular god at some special crisis in the fortunes of a state. It will embrace also the later and more solemn forms of the Dithyramb, and to some extent even the earlier, in so far as these were consecrated to the worship of Dionysus. The Parthenia, or maiden-hymns, sung by choirs of girls, seem to have been a branch of the Prosodia, and will naturally be placed in the same class. We hear also of Enthronismi, performed apparently at the erection of a new statue of a god in its appropriate niche in his temple. But of all this class of Choral poetry only fragments remain.
Our second class will include Encomia, or complimentary poems in honour of living princes and their exploits; Epinicia (closely connected with Encomia, and perhaps to be regarded as a branch of them), which celebrated victories in the various local athletic contests of the Greeks, and especially in the four great games;[2] also Odes for the installation of magistrates, a specimen of which, by a fortunate blunder of a grammarian, has been preserved to us among Pindar's Epinicia, and now figures in his extant works as the Eleventh Nemean Ode. Lastly, we must add the Threni, or dirges, of which no complete specimen remains. Amid all the ravages made by Time on the grand fabric of Greek poetry, there is none, perhaps, more to be regretted than that which has destroyed for ever works embodying probably the deepest thoughts and loftiest aspirations of the Greek race on the subject of death and the life beyond it.
Of the third class, the most important seem to have been the Scolia, or cross-songs. To perform these the Chorus was divided, and the successive verses assigned to its different sections, so that the song appeared to travel backwards and forwards in a crooked track across the room. Such Choric Scolia were probably confined to the banquet-halls of princes. The ordinary Scolium, of which we hear so often in accounts of private entertainments, employed no Chorus at all. It was a mere solo performance, begun by one of the guests to the accompaniment of a harp, which he played himself; presently he handed the harp across the table to another feaster, who continued the performance, and so on. The Choric Scolium, on the contrary, required all the regular apparatus of a Choral Ode, the singers, the orchestra of flutes and harps, and the ballet.
The chief sources which supplied the themes of Choric poetry in its highest developments—the Hymn, the Pæan, and the Encomium—have already been indicated. The chiefest of all was Mythology. In the ideal legendary world of gods and heroes, the Choral Ode in its perfection lived and moved and had its being. The loves and wars of deities, the fabled glories of old heroic houses—
"Thebes and Pelops' line,
And the tale of Troy divine;"—
such were the themes from which its poets mainly drew their inspiration. The princes and nobles, in whose honour Encomia and Epinicia were performed, boasted descent from the supernatural beings by whom this ideal world was peopled, and their exploits were described by the Choric poet, not merely as attesting their divine ancestry, but as, to some extent, lifting them into the world of gods and heroes, and making them partakers in its life. In the opening stanzas of the Sixth Nemean Ode, the physical and intellectual achievements of man are described as bridging over, in part, the gulf which separates him from the gods, whose blood he shares.
"One is the race of men and gods: one womb
Teemed with us all that breathe with vital breath.
But oh, how widely severed is our doom!
We naught, and good for naught;
They—for their home the brazen heaven is wrought,
A home that knows nor change nor death.
Yet somewhat we approach the immortal kind
In stalwart strength and mighty mind."—(S.)
Accordingly, the exploits of a divinely-descended noble were regarded as the sequel and continuation of those of his superhuman ancestor. The god is invoked to rejoice in his descendant's prowess, and the highest compliment which the poet can pay to the descendant is to recall the legendary achievements of the ancestor, and compare them with those of the descendant. Again, the misfortunes of ancient gods and heroes, and their ultimate triumph over them, are employed to console their supposed descendants for baffled projects, and to encourage them to new aspirations in the future. And if, as sometimes happens, the poet desires to convey to his patron some lesson of warning or advice which he fears may be unwelcome, a reference to ancient legends, and usually to those connected with the house or city of his patron, enables him often to point his moral under the guise of paying a compliment. We shall see hereafter how, in the hands of a great poet like Pindar, the legends of antiquity became a potent instrument for instilling lessons of practical and political wisdom, of morality, and of generous ambition, into the minds of his patrons. Less skilful artists doubtless employed the myths with less discrimination and less earnest purpose, using them merely as "purple patches" to conceal the nakedness of their fancy, and heaping them together without order or selection to swell their odes into the required number of stanzas. It is said by Plutarch that Pindar himself, in his early days, was jestingly rebuked by his countrywoman, the poetess Corinna, for a similar undiscriminating use of mythology. "One should sow," she said, "with the hand, and not with the whole sack." If this tale be true, he seems, if we may judge from his earliest extant ode, to have outgrown his fault before he reached the age of twenty.
The death of a good and great man was regarded by the Choric poet as an actual translation into this ideal world of gods and heroes. There he met with his divine and heroic ancestors, and thenceforward shared their life and pleasures. As might therefore be expected, the extant fragments of Pindar's Dirges deal chiefly with this theme. A mass of occult speculation on the life after death was preserved in certain secret confraternities among the Greeks, whose meetings were attended with the celebration of the rites called "Mysteries." These "mysteries" have been described as "a sort of Greek Freemasonry." It is not for those uninitiated in either craft to judge of the justice of such a comparison. It is believed that sundry fragments of Pindar's Dirges bear traces of the influence of these speculations. In others he seems to adopt a more popular and less lofty creed; and in one especially, which we will take this opportunity to quote, he pictures the righteous dead as enjoying a state of unalloyed felicity, which, as he describes it, is a simple idealisation of perfect earthly happiness such as the Greeks conceived it. Thus[3] he paints the life of the denizens of his "Earthly Paradise," for "earthly" we must own it to be:—
"On them the sun in his strength sheds light, while here on earth is night,
And in meadows of red roses lies the suburb of their town,
With fruits of gold and spikenard bowers o'ergrown.
And some in steeds and sports, and some in dice,
And some in harps have joy, and all wealth's flowers bloom ever there.
And fragrance spreads about their country fair,
As in the altar's dazzling flame they mingle all sweet spice."
As a companion picture to this, we may take a strophe from Pindar's earliest extant Ode, the Tenth Pythian. Here he is describing the bliss, not of the righteous dead, but of the happiest of living men, the wondrous Hyperboreans, dwellers "at the back of the North-wind," in a country visited by heroes like Heracles and Perseus, but to which "nor fleets nor feet" may avail to guide adventurous mortals.
"Nor at their customs stands
The muse aloof, but all around, the maiden bands
Dance ever to the sound of harp and shrilling fife;
Their locks with golden laurel crowned, they feast in careless joy.
Disease nor wasting eld may e'er their bliss alloy.
A consecrated race, remote from toil and strife."
Not dissimilar is the vision of a city in time of peace, sketched in a fragment of a Hymn by Pindar's contemporary and rival, Bacchylides.[4]
"But mighty Peace to mortals brings a dower
Of Wealth, and honeyed Music's every flower;
On carven altars then the fat of ox
Wastes in the yellow flame, and fleecy flocks;
And striplings' thoughts are bent on sport, and flute, and feast."
In other fragments of Pindar's Dirges we find allusions to the life after death as a period of probation, and of an "atonement accepted by Persephone," the awful mistress of the lower world. And elsewhere doubtless he introduced pictures of souls awaiting at the tribunals of Æacus and Rhadamanthus that unerring and inevitable sentence which should award to them, according to their works, an eternity of bliss or torment. And if the subject of a dirge had been an Æginetan of some great Æacid house, he would naturally (we may imagine) pass on to trace the legendary career of the hero, who had exchanged the sovereignty of Ægina for a judgment-seat in the nether world, and would show how the justice of his earthly life had fitted him to discharge the awful duties of judging the spirits in prison.
The Hyporchema or Mimic-dance seems to have been considered as a lighter and livelier style of composition than the Hymn or the Pæan. Yet its performance was connected with the services of religion; it was exhibited on occasions where we should rather have expected the performance of a Pæan, to avert the dreaded consequences of some supposed portent; it invoked the favour of deities, and related the adventures of heroes. One fragment of a Pindaric Hyporchema appears to narrate some exploit of Heracles (Hercules) of a literally bloodthirsty character.
"He drank them mingled in blood,"[5]
it begins, and then comes a description of the blows of his club "crushing through bones and marrow." Another,[6] which we will quote entire, from a Hyporchema performed to appease the Sun-god on the occasion of a solar eclipse, gives a vivid picture of Greek superstition, and is alluded to (though not quoted) by the Roman Pliny.[7] The original poem is in a light and rapid metre, illustrating the close connection between the Hyporchema and the Dithyramb.
"Why, all-seeing light of the Sun, to mine eyes dispensing sight,—
Why hast thou stolen in daytime thy soaring orb from view—
And all to nothing hast brought the wings of human might,
And wisdom's paths—and speedest along a darksome way,
To bring to pass some marvel new?
Nay, in Zeus' name, I pray thee, bid that thy flying steeds
Turn to the weal of Thebes this portent in all men's sight!
Yet oh, if thou tellest of wars, or blight, or of whelming snow,
Or faction fell, or seas outpouring to drown our meads,
Or freezing of fields, or a summer bedrenched with furious rain,
Or if Earth thou'lt drown, and store it with new-made folk again,
'Mid my wailing fellows I'll bide the blow!"
As to the Scolia, or drinking-songs, we have seen that a choral treatment of them was the exception and not the rule. And probably, even when so treated, they made less use of the stores of mythology than the more serious classes of Choral poetry. Their usual themes would naturally be the praise of Love and Wine. Yet, since Love and Wine were personified by Greek fancy in Aphrodite and Dionysus, we need not consider even the scoliastic poet as wholly precluded from availing himself of the chief fountain of Greek lyric inspiration—the Myths.
Speaking generally, and not dwelling on unimportant exceptions, it may be stated that, whatever was the especial occasion of a Choral Ode, the chief materials of its themes were supplied by sources, of which all classes of Choral poetry availed themselves alike. And chief among these were the legendary world of gods and heroes, and the unseen world of spirits, which Greek religion conceived as embracing and underlying all the material universe.